Canon EOS 70D review gains test scene samples

We're working towards completing our review of the Canon EOS 70D and have been shooting our test scene with a production camera. We've published the test shots, including downloadable Raw files of both the daylight and low light scene. The EOS 70D review will also be one of the few chances to see our outgoing test scene and our new, more challenging, more informative scene alongside one another. Click through to see how it performs.

Now we have a production-standard EOS 70D we'll be forging ahead to get the review completed as soon as we can. In the meantime, here's a chance to see in close detail and in challenging lighting, how Canon's Dual AF Pixel sensor behaves.

Comments

I have 70d canon , very nice in video , autofocus work greate, but the lens 18-135 give me many erors when i take photo. I want to send the lens for calibrate . It's posible to use sigma 18-35 mm 1.8 for video whit autofocus? www.nunti-de-lux.ro. Somebody tested the sigma whit autofocus?Thanks

Interesting test photo subject matter, but it doesn't work for historical comparisons. I think the black background doesn't work for that reason.

Wonder if that is the point. Less and less true difference between the new cameras and the old when it comes to image quality. I guess if you can't see the difference in similar images then they can convince you to buy the newest, latest, greatest.

Bells and whistles are great, but if there is not a significant difference in image quality then I guess they have to come up with some other way to get your money.

Could be easy, too. A basketball suspended from a string in the ceiling, brought back to standardized positions (different heights to produce different velocities when released) using standardized lighting. Camera on continuous focus and drive at standardized distance, starts shooting when ball is released. Count the number of in-focus shots.

Ball could be released so that one could assess various angles relative to the camera - straight-on toward/away from camera; 45 degrees vector relative to camera.

dpr could glue small printing labels on the ball with different size fonts to standardize the focus accuracy rankings.

dpr would need a room with standardized lighting, 1 basketball or soccer ball, 1 string, 1 stepladder, 1 piece of wood mounted on a sturdy tripod to hold ball in position, 1 set of alignment marks on the floor to position the tripod.

You have a new test scene! This is time to use new testing procedures.

Instead of pinning aperture and iso only you also need to pin shutter speed.

After you pin shutter speed then normalize the image with gain +/-. This is the only way to assure proper iso comparisions. It's not a fair comparison that the e-m1 gets 2/3 stop more light than the 70d.

DonSantos, pinning the shutter speed or whatsoever makes sense only if you know that the firmware reports the really applied values. The reported shutter speeds may be incorrect just like the ISO values often are.

nothing is reliable, shutter or aperture (and transmission), but ISO is not something we care. we can do good tests without knowing real values of ISO settings of a camera, though we can know what they are if other parts of the test are done correctly.

This makes me want the 70D sensor in a lighter "package", e.g. in the probable EOS 750D. For a possible / probable 7D mk II, an even better sensor is needed (or at least this is what I would like). My opinion. Cheers! :)

I have a feeling that Canon is going to pull out all the stops with the 7D Mk II and almost force Nikon to respond. Not sure what sensor it will have (70D or something new) but it should be a very nice camera.

The new test scene is so hard to use. I am so used to the old one that the new one leaves me lost on where I should use to compare cameras. The watch face, egypt on the globe, paperclip, battery, old lady's face and label on bottle are all gone.....

would appreciate PH not be used as a standard for it makes comparison of different aspect ratios hard.

when we use the comparison tool, we see a fraction of image and not the aspect ratio which is really irrelevant. it's not field of view but magnification.

it may be called "area magnification" that a subject projected on a sensor occupies a fixed fraction of area regardless of the size and shape of sensor (be it circular or triangular).

or simply "any subject gets same number of pixels on sensors of same pixel count." the opposite will look strange.

then the test target may look like a cross of 3 rectangles of exactly the same area for 4:3, 3:2, and 16:9 sensors. the fully overlaped center area be used for sensor comparisons and non-overlaped parts are needed for lens tests.

@yabokkie - it's a good idea, but it's too late to completely redesign the chart. In fairness we've been inviting comments about the chart for nearly a year and this is the first time we've seen this suggestion.

currently you use 100% of 4:3 against 88.9% of 3:2 (area) which get 0.17 stops lower performance (= log2(88.9%), I arbitrarily think the total error should be less than 1/6 stops and this consumes all of it, for nothing).

think about the tests you are going to do in the following years from medium format to smart phones ...

The 70D and EM-1 corners look almost indentical, but in the center and borders, it's clear the 70D is showing better per-pixel sharpness in RAW. Labels on the Vinegar, playing cards, Schilling bank note, tubes of paint labels, spools of thread, two pencils drawings all show higher acutance, more detail on the 70D image.

for JPEG shooters this may not be true! Oly show up with some great results across the picture. The difference though is really secondary importance in "normal" shooting which is amazing and just show that m4/3 are "equally" capable as DSLRs to the level that one can chose a camera per something else than pure image quality.

What are you looking at? JPEG ISO 100, replace 700d with E-M1, put the rectangle at extreme lower left corner. Now look at the lower right corner of the crop. First (lowest) set of lines is merged on both. But one up is distinctive on E-M1, merged on 70d. In RAW it is still merged, only now drowns in CA on both 70D and D7100 shots.

The 70D and D7100 RAWs seem to lead most of the other crop sensor cameras in sharpness.

The X-Pro1 and E-M1 seem similar, and a bit softer in comparison to the 70D and D7100. I do miss the Lira note of the old test scene, but if you look at the engraved bank note or the hair, for example, it's pretty easy to judge RAW detail.

I hope that use the best 50mm that each system has when you re shoot (the new 50 1.4 CZ from sony rather than the old 50). When doing resolution tests, lens and camera work together; to test camera only the sigma 50 would be a comparison tool if it was available in the mount tested.

I'm not an expert at these kinds of tests, but I wonder how much these comparison tests are more a comparison test of lenses than the the camera. Certainly for the same camera make with the same lens mount one can use the same lens and see differences in the rest of the hardware. All bets are off when comparing different makes when exactly the same lens can't be used across them.

Gendlemen of DPR,with all due respect,your comparison tool for the low light IQ is definately wrong.How can it be that e.g.at 25600 iso the best of all the existing database gear to be the RX100II (OK,after 5Diii)???Should pay attention to the exposures equalization algorithm,or what?Just a feedback in good faith..

yet another good (but bulky) DSLR from Canon.Taking ocasion I am trying to attract your attention to the Oly E-M1 latest machine and want you to see that the high ISO OF LATEST M4/3 SENSOR IS RIGHT ON PAIR WITH THE BEST DSLR LIKE THIS ONE.

It remains to be seen if Oly still plays with its ISO ratings to deliver this result.

If the exposure value (ie the amount of light reaching the sensor) has to be twice as much as other cameras for a given ISO, then it's not really a performance but more likely that you should compare ISO 6400 from Oly to ISO 3200 of other manufacturers.

"If the exposure value (ie the amount of light reaching the sensor) has to be twice as much as other cameras for a given ISO, then it's not really a performance but more likely that you should compare ISO 6400 from Oly to ISO 3200 of other manufacturers."

Why? The exposure value at a given ISO gives you an EV number. So for example at ISO 100, EV 13 which is a typical daylight scene, clouds but bright and no shadows should mean the camera sets an exposure of 1/125 and F8.

If that is what you get when you meter this scene with an Oly why would you NOT compare the output at this ISO with the ISO 100 output from any other camera assuming the other cameras also correctly metered the scene to mean1/125 at F8?

If the Oly set an exposure of 1/60 @ F8 @ ISO 100 for an EV 13 scene you many have a point but I bet it doesn't.

I don't know what you mean by bulky. This size camera is great in the hand to use. It fits well with easy access to the controls. Smaller CSC type cameras make it hard (For Me and some other photographers) to use. Access to functions have a way to go on smaller cameras. (My and people I speak to views anyway)

For me, it's not the size in the hand so much as it is the weight on the shoulder at the end of the day. It's also the bulk of the camera bag—it's a pain schlepping a big bag of full-size DSLR lenses and bodies through airports and in among crowds. When I'm out and about I want to feel like a photographer, not a donkey. If I were a studio photographer, it wouldn't be an issue.

http://www.dxomark.com/index.php/Cameras/Camera-Sensor-Database/Olympus/PEN-EPM1 - Olympus is not very honest in marking ISO. For example, ISO12800 set on EPM1 is only ISO7693. That's why we see the difference in camera settings.

Le-alain and hippo84 are right of course. Also, different lenses have different optimal settings, and since these are camera reviews I'm sure the apertures selected are those giving the optimal results to not make the outcome depending on the lens instead.

PS: Henry, I hope you do realize that f16-22 gives significantly worse sharpness figures than f8 due to diffraction? Not everything is down to a conspiracy, and dpreview reviewers generally know very well what they are doing...

Do not confuse the DXOmark ISO measurements with indicated camera ISO's. The latter is what directly affects comparisons seen here, the DXO ISO's do not necessarily reflect metering or even "cheating". It's only a way to normalize output for RAW comparison purposes.

The top of the "noise" page from the final review, will usually tell you how camera ISO's compare to one given ISO standard ( ISO 12232:2006).

@yabokkie - I think you're saying that DxO is right to do what it does (though your simplistic use of 'per ISO standard' risks being misleading). I'm not disputing that. If that isn't what you mean, please try to re-state your point.

What I am saying (and they also state) is that what DxO shows is not ISO cheating in any meaningful sense. Our test shots suggest the E-M1 may be around 1/3EV less sensitive than the EOS 5D Mark III, using the section of the ISO standard that manufacturers use (the one marked on cameras).

Greg VdB wrote: "and dpreview reviewers generally know very well what they are doing..."

How do you KNOW this?

I would say dpreview knows (obviously) quite a lot about photography. But unfortunately they seem not to be trained physicists/statisticians... The results here LOOK very reputalbe and professional. But in my opinion from a scientific point of view they are not.

I don't think this is tragic - it's just a sad thing that the LEADING websites on the web (concerning camera/sensor/lens tests) neither do have scientific standards nor scientific training in what they are doing (including DxO unfortunately :( ).

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying everything is wrong here. I just feel that many people take results here as absolute and objective and apodictic truths.

The most obvious problem with the tests here is (of course) sample size. With a sample size of 1 (and often minute differences discussed) you couldn't publish any scientific paper anywhere without being laughed at...

You have an excellent point, but I'm assuming that these guys only get one sample of a camera to test. So is there a scientific way for them to take that into account? Certainly there must be lots of other situations in science and engineering when you only get one shot at something, like when you do a flyby of a planet or or the thing you are testing is so expensive or rare that your budget can only afford one. So what would you do then? Help us out here....

we need a way to know the real exposure to decide where the chart should be positioned horizontally. DxOMark have their own standard and that's okay because our priority is to have a level ground (makers have their own standards, too. but Canon and Nikon are the same).

I assume all DxOMark charts at a certain ISO value have the same exposure to unit sensor area (may be shifted from ISO standard). I assume them do the thing right.

it has to be called cheating if the exposures are too different (how different is a subjective issue that we may want to decide by polls).

One of the problems with measuring RAW (binary) data rather than looking at RAW files opened in converters, is that for example you don't take into account possible default adjustments done under the hood in those converters for "correct exposure". The A99 for example was the first SLT to rely on this to compensate for the light "loss" due to the beamsplittter, a digital correction in the converter rather than a digital correction before writing the RAW file (simple multiplying of values or extra analogue sensor gain, which both means throwing away a bit of highlight headroom). In the DXO ISO chart, that means the A99 suddenly scores much lower than previous SLT cameras, which lead some to believe that it "cheats" when it has nothing to do with metering of visual exposures.

The X100 uses this above ISO 1600. Which can be witnessed in the DXO ISO chart as a "flatliner", even though the visual exposures are still affected above ISO 1600, both in RAW (supported converters) and jpegs.

@Chiemsee - None of us are physicists but several of us have science degrees and have a pretty good understanding of the scientific method.

Our tests are designed to be as fair, consistent and meaningful as possible, but they're not supposed to be definitive scientific tests - mainly because there isn't an obvious mechanism to pay for the amount of work that would require.

Our testing is planned in such a way as to make it as useful as possible. They're not the only tests that can be conducted - you'll see plenty of people who will insist that the only way we should do them are the way they propose.

We have a pretty good understanding of what our tests do and don't show and where the limitations of them are but, as I say, the aim is to be fair, consistent and photographically relevant.

Dear Mr. Butler, to find out whether the claimed ISO values are correct, you need to know the real shutter speed and lens transmission at all relevant settings. Using these values and a standard lighting, you can calculate the real ISO values from the test images. The lens transmission is measured by DxOMark, but what about the shutter speed? If some firmware would show 1/60s instead of the real 1/30 s, you would "see" a 1 stop better ISO performance.

R Butler wrote: "We have a pretty good understanding of what our tests do"

Let's assume that's correct. Then still most of your readers don't have this understanding. And they use your tests in a, well let's say 'dangerous' way.

A lot of discussions concentrate on MINUTE variations at pixel level.

Without analyzing- sample variation,- RAW converter influence,- interaction effects of certain lens/body combinationsquite a lot of the conclusions are, well let's put it in a simple but unfortunately true word: useless.

Again, discussing MINUTE variations based on sample size 1 tests without even given a ROUGH estimation of sigma are - scientificifally speaking - massively flawed. It could be regarded as intellectually dishonest to offer those test to the (often scientifically untrained) public without explicitly indicating the limitations... ;-/

I just looked at EXIF of some of the new test shots. their exposure values suggest different conditions, given all aperture, shutter, and ISO numbers are accurate, which is of course not ture, but the calculation goes, 3136 lux for E-M1 and GX73164 lux for E-M5, 3781 lux for 5D3, 3920 lux for 70D and NEX-6,

the cameras will be on a level ground at these illuminance, or in other words, if the lighting in the studio provided less than 3920 lux for 70D and NEX-6, these two cameras should have performed worse and it's not fair for them.